I slept in this morning, and so, instead of drinking my coffee before reading the usual depressing world news, I did while drinking my first morning cuppajoe. Boy, this story woke me up in a hurry.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/...
My take on this below the fold, wisecracks and all....
For those who keep up with military matters on a regular basis, this story is not shocking. But I'm not one of them, and frankly, I don't need to -- my ex-Navy husband does this and then tells me about what he's found and read lately. I justify my mental laziness on the grounds that there is so much dirt out there to excavate, and so few hours in a day, that if I did all my own digging, I would never get anything else accomplished -- like my damn dissertation. But when it shows up on my browser's homepage first stinking thing in on a lazy Sunday morning, I have to read it. Most of the story holds few surprises for those who know about the Meijia case (God, I hope I spelled his name correctly) here, but there are some interesting nuggets in there. Hmmm, maybe interesting isn't the best word. Disturbing. Yeah, that's the right word.
(For some reason, I don't have a block-quote formatting option. So, if you see quotation marks, that's directly from the BBC story.)
This story came out just as Parliament has begun to debate a new measure:
"a law that will forbid military personnel refusing to participate in the occupation of a foreign country."
Now this alone is something to make you choke on your java. If Parliament is considering this, how long before Congress pulls something along similar lines? What would that do to those who assert conscientious objector status? Oh, let's see, it will become illegal to refuse to go in and sit on a population that's resentful, even hostile, of your presence for extremely good reasons. How far up will this go? Is this aimed at the enlisted only, or are there officers who have refused to serve in Iraq? It seems to have become a serious worry in the British military, an escalating problem:
"Labour MP John McDonnell told Parliament this week there had been a tripling in cases over the past three years."
So much for the "coalition of the willing." This sounds rather more like the "coalition of guys who said 'Bloody hell, I can't get out of this mess!!'" And frankly, I can't say I'm all that surprised, for reasons you'll see below. But the stakes for refusing -- and running -- for the individual soldier are going to be very high indeed if this becomes law:
"refusal to take part in the occupation of a foreign country [would be] punishable by a maximum life sentence in prison."
Got that? Punishable by a maximum life sentence. This tells me they are worried sick about this problem, that it is in fact growing rapidly, and that it is more than just desertion. It sounds to me that they have a lot of personnel saying "I love my military career, but I cannot obey the order to go to Iraq." And indeed the next paragraph makes clear that this is exactly what is happening:
"Lawyers who represent members of the military at courts martial say that they are increasingly being contacted by people who want advice about getting out of having to serve in Iraq, even if they do not want to go to the extreme of deserting."
The British military has a huge problem on its hands. It has servicemen who, once in-country, look at the disintegrating situation surrounding them and say "If I ever get out of this alive, I will not return" and do one of two things -- take off at the first opportunity, or start looking for every legal loophole a smart barrister can find to get them off the hook. And it is far more likely to be the career NCOs and officers who do the latter. THAT is what has the British military scared green. This situation would scare our military, and you can bet they are watching this very, very closely. No military can run without experienced personnel. They are the ones who keep the lower-level enlisted and new-minted officers working as a unit. Lose them, and your service branch starts to come apart at the seams. Hence the punitive sentence. They don't have the death penalty in the UK, so the maximum punishment is on a par with being convicted of murder.
Now what might this have to do with our military? Quite a lot, actually:
"Ben Griffin was a member of the elite SAS. He told his commanding officer, earlier this year, that he was not prepared to return to Iraq because he said he saw American forces carrying out what he thought were illegal acts. He was allowed to leave the military and he now says: 'I was disturbed by the general day-to-day attitude of the American troops. They treated Iraqis with contempt, not like human beings. They had a complete disregard for Iraqi lives and property.... There's contempt for the locals. We don't even know how many have been killed.'"
In other words, Haditha is no fluke. It is not a one-off. The atrocity occured as a direct result of poisonous attitudes towards the occupied, the civilians. And the British soldiers are sick and tired of watching this, suffering the consequences, and being unable to do a damned thing to stop it. If there is a next time, cooperation is going to be, well, difficult. A bitch, in fact, and deservedly so.
The article brought to mind an encounter I had last year with a former British soldier. My husband and I had a long and, given the story he had to tell, reasonably cordial conversation with this man. It came about in part because my husband and I were groaning about going home after nearly four months in Europe, our digusted curiosity about what new outrages might have occured while we were gone, and my husband's concerns about what messes our military might have gotten into recently. This fellow overheard us, and we started talking about US and UK politics and Iraq. Once he figured out that we were okay, he told us his story. Because of the gentleman's concerns, I won't relate the context, or even many specifics, of the conversation. He doesn't want any trouble, and he asked us specifically to keep it on the QT. I will say that he was involved in an incident that both the UK and US want to keep hushed up, one that reflects very, very badly on our military. The basics, from what he told us, were crystal clear. Our military has screwed this up so badly, not just from the planning end, but all the way down to the raw soldiers in the field, that our forces are not the only ones suffering the consequences. The National Guardsmen are a major problem, in that most on first arrival have little or no field experience, and in the early days particularly were prone to panic if ambushed. Our "coalition partners" are getting hurt in the crossfire, and some of them are sustaining career-ending injuries, with twenty or more years of their lives flushed down the toilet. There is a lot of bitterness in the British miltary, if this one man is any indication, and only a fool would expect those remaining to passively accept their fates as cannon fodder.
How long can the UK sustain their participation? Without legislation to browbeat their military personnel into accepting their orders without question or demur, not much longer. Hence this proposed law.
How big a problem is desertion and refusal to serve specifically in Iraq by career personnel for the US military? That is a good question, and I don't have any read on that at all. I suspect this is happening, but that it is being kept quiet: to steal an old ad line, only the Pentagon knows for sure. If it is a sizable, growing problem, can we expect laws, like this one being debated in Parliament, being proposed here?